The invention relates to the field of oscillatory resonant electromagnetic modes, and in particular to oscillatory resonant electromagnetic modes, with localized slowly evanescent field patterns, for wireless non-radiative energy transfer.
In the early days of electromagnetism, before the electrical-wire grid was deployed, serious interest and effort was devoted towards the development of schemes to transport energy over long distances wirelessly, without any carrier medium. These efforts appear to have met with little, if any, success. Radiative modes of omnidirectional antennas, which work very well for information transfer, are not suitable for such energy transfer, because a vast majority of energy is wasted into free space. Directed radiation modes, using lasers or highly-directional antennas, can be efficiently used for energy transfer, even for long distances (transfer distance LTRANS<<LDEV, where LDEV is the characteristic size of the device), but require existence of an uninterruptible line-of-sight and a complicated tracking system in the case of mobile objects.
Rapid development of autonomous electronics of recent years (e.g. laptops, cell-phones, house-hold robots, that all typically rely on chemical energy storage) justifies revisiting investigation of this issue. Today, the existing electrical-wire grid carries energy almost everywhere; even a medium-range wireless non-radiative energy transfer would be quite useful. One scheme currently used for some important applications relies on induction, but it is restricted to very close-range (LTRANS<<LDEV) energy transfers.